LARRY McHUGH: Chamber gears up for Youth@Work

LARRY McHUGH, Chamber Corner

Published 12:00 am, Monday, April 5, 2010

As we move into April, our chamber's Youth @ Work program will be gearing up as applications become available midway through the month. As you know, this program is made in part by the Workforce Alliance of New Haven; it has been a staple program of the chamber for many years. New for this year, the chamber will join with the Workforce Alliance for another great job program, Employer Outreach Initiative, which is funded by the alliance.

The aim of this program is to provide comprehensive employer, worker and general services to strengthen the job market in the region. The employer services offered in this new program are far reaching. Not only will the chamber maintain a database for logging all employer contacts, it will also function as an even more efficient source for communication between business and government. The chamber will inform local and state government staff of ongoing workforce activities and needs and refer employers to appropriate state agencies based on the unique needs of each business. Within this scope, it is vital for open and effective communication between businesses and government. This region will serve to be even more business-friendly because of this service.

Also, along the lines of more effective communication, I am very excited that another one of the employer services to be offered is the new ability for employers who are chamber members to post job openings on the newly-designed and modernized Middlesex Chamber Web site. This new ability is so exciting because employers will be able to now use our Web site as a main hub in order to truly be a bridge between these employers and the many job seekers that we see each week.

The worker services to be offered in the Employer Outreach Initiative are just as important. As I just mentioned, the chamber deals with many displaced workers each week. We will continue to refer the unemployed, underemployed, as well as employed individuals to services within this new one-stop system.

We hope to use the program with two new businesses that are moving into Middletown: Norpaco Gourmet Foods and Price Chopper.

It is great to see that this new initiative is off the ground and past the planning stages. I would like to that Workforce Alliance of New Haven Director Bill Villano and Business Services Director Bill Pitre for laying the framework for this program and ultimately committing the necessary funds.

Moving forward with our 3rd Annual Healthcare Summit, which will be held Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cromwell, the attendance projection for this outstanding event grows by the day, and we fully expect to have 150 to 200 people from the health care industry and representatives from every Chamber of Commerce in the state in attendance.

Again, the summit's program will be a series of concurrent workshops during the morning session, a break for lunch, and then keynote presentations, and then keynote presentations from leading experts in the health-care field to close out the day. The featured concurrent workshops are: Promoting Wellness, Implementing a Health Literacy Program and Developing a Successful Health Care Council, and the keynote presentations of the day will be: The Value of Pharmaceutical Research and Development: Myths vs. Reality and Geographic Variations in Health Care Costs and Results -- Connecticut vs. U.S. and a Best Practice Area, the Dramatic Variations Within Connecticut.

All of these issues are some of the most talked about issues in the industry, and I am certain that we will cover a lot of ground with them at the health-care summit.

Another reminder for the three terrific events coming up in downtown Middletown: the Citizens Bank 5K Summer Fun Run, Car Cruise on Main, and Motorcycle Mania. The three committees, let by Rob Holzberg, Foster Charles and Norm LeBlanc, and Rich Greco and Leblanc, respectively, continue to work hard to bring thousands of people to our city during June, July and August.

For more information on the 3rd Annual Healthcare Summit, contact Johanna Bond at the chamber at (860) 347-6924 or by e-mail at johanna@middlesex